Scientists in Halifax finally recovered hours of research data lost on the ocean floor for 3 and a half years. The retrieval included 19 hours of video footage from a camera mounted to the grey seal lost in 2018. It was recently dragged up in fishing gear this summer and the camera was still functional.
The department of Fisheries and Oceans biologist Damian Lidgard said “I was shocked. Absolutely shocked,” Lidgard was the man who attached the device to the young male grey seal on Sable Island on December 31, 2017. He was hoping the seal would come ashore so he could easily recover the camera and another built-in sensor that will detect other things.
Lidgard explained that “Basically for the next three or four weeks, every single day, I searched Sable looking for that male and never found him.” The device is thought to have fallen off the seal when it molted in the spring. The $10,000 camera was deployed by an Ocean Tracking Network research project that tracked the movements of grey seals from the giant Sable Island colony.
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